A college student's quest for food (Navigation is at the bottom! Go ahead and scroll!)

I haven’t done much cooking this summer, but I decided to try something out today! I’m spending the summer doing research in Pittsburgh, but my meals have generally consisted of 1) eating out, 2) lunch leftovers, or 3) microwaveable/add water meals, and as such, I haven’t been updating the food blog that much. But that changes today!

Inspired by last year’s granola crusted chicken, I decided to do another crusted chicken dish. I decided to use Crispix cereal (mostly because that’s what I had), and crushed that into crumbs. Lacking spices, I decided to add some crushed pretzels to add some salt.

Cereal and pretzels about to be crushed

Crushed cereal and pretzels for breading

Then I prepared the chicken. I purchased three chicken breasts at the market this morning (one for tonight, two for later this week, but I cooked them all tonight). I dredged them in an egg mixture and then covered them in the crumb mixture. I then put them into a hot greased pan and let them cook.

Chicken covered in crumbs

Chicken in the pan

Chicken cooking

I would have liked finer breadcrumbs to get better coverage of the chicken, but I think it ended up alright. While the chicken was going, I started boiling a pot of water to cook the asparagus. I also cut up a mango, to help make a sauce – one of the things that I wish I had during the first time I made something like this.

Steaming asparagus

Cutting up a mango

Soon the asparagus and chicken were done, and I pulled them out – along with all the little crispy bits of cereal and pretzel that had fallen off into the pan! The “sauce” was pretty simple. Again, multitasking my ingredients, I had a bottle of balsamic vinaigrette dressing, which I put into the pan with some butter and mango slices. It was already pretty reduced and I didn’t have to wait too long.

Cereal crusted chicken on top of steamed asparagus

Mango pieces in a balsamic “sauce”

Cereal crusted chicken with mango balsamic sauce

In the end, it was quite delicious! The asparagus would cooked well, and the chicken was still juicy. The crust on the chicken was sweet, and the balsamic and mango sauce had a nice mix of flavors. The sauce helped add flavor to the chicken, since I lacked other spices, and the crust didn’t cover the whole chicken. I’m not sure if I will get to cook again this summer (hopefully though!), but this was a lot of fun to do!

So Saturday night I was in the mood for some fish (partly since I missed out on Fish Fridays). And, I had been having a craving for asparagus for close to a week at this point. So I figured it’d be the perfect time to do both!

Asparagus

The asparagus was pretty simple, I had to trim off the bottom of a few of the spears before I washed them. Ideally, I would have steamed them, but lacking a steamer, I opted to put them in about a half inch of water in the pot. At least they stacked up so most of them were above water level and steamed. I also mixed them around a few times so the ones at the bottom wouldn’t be over boiled. They came out quite well after a few minutes – cooked, but still crisp, with that great asparagus flavor (no soggy, wilting asparagus here!)

After that it was time to cook the tilapia I had bought. It was frozen when I bought it but by now it was defrosted. Seasoned with a little salt and garlic powder, I put them in the pot with some oil and cooked them for a couple minutes until done (with a little browning crust). I also now realize that this is the first tilapia I’ve done this summer that was not done in the oven.

Cooked fish! All it needs now is the sauce…

Then, I tried my hand at a sauce. Taking out the fish, I then poured in some balsamic vinaigrette salad dressing. Now ideally, I would have used balsamic vinegar, but I’ll take what I can get. I let that boil for a little bit and reduce (and caramelize/blacken some of those spices that are in the dressing). When I felt that it had reduced enough (meaning a wild guess), I added some butter into the mixture to melt and give it a little more richness.

Reducing the balsamic vinaigrette dressing

Plating time – I put the fish and some asparagus on the plate, and added some rice leftovers from my last chicken meal. Afterwards, I poured a tiny bit of the balsamic butter sauce onto the fish. Just a little at first, to see how it tasted.

Great meal! (With a dash of sauce)

And to my surprise, it was quite good! Despite some burnt parts, it had a lot of flavor – some sweetness, but also some tartness – there was a great blend of flavors which went well with the fish. After taking a bite, I added a bit more of the sauce to the fish!

Now this is one of those blog posts that suffers a bit because of the custom font, and the special character set that it has – the title for today should be:

August 3, 2012: (Pot) “Roasted” Chicken

Mind you, this was no pot roast chicken! This was a chicken “roasted” in a pot – perhaps pan-fried is a better description. But there’s a little background on this. I was intending to do some sort of chicken where I’d have to season or batter it, on the last Friday night. However, I got wrapped up in a rather lengthy conversation and before I knew it, it was 8pm! By then, I wasn’t that interested in shopping for food and then cooking, in what would probably at least an hour to an hour and a half (I was going to make rice too, in the same pot). So I remembered that Whole Foods has pre-seasoned chicken, so I bought some chicken hind quarters seasoned with lemon and pepper. I also purchased a head of broccoli and a baguette.

Pre-seasoned chicken

Broccoli

When I got back, the first task was to cook the broccoli. I figured I’d steam it and only use a little water, instead of boiling it, so I could use less water, and it wouldn’t take as long to start boiling. The broccoli was soon done.

Chicken in the pot

After that,I put in a smidge of butter to melt in the hot pot, and then added the chicken as soon as possible. (As the chicken got warm, it added quite a bit of oil, thus the fried roasted chicken – had to pour out some of the excess at one point).

Great bread (still warm from the store too!)

While the chicken was going, I enjoyed some bread from the baguette to tide me over while everything cooked through. The chicken got a nice crusting, though I had to wait a while for it to cook all the way through.

Chicken done – great crust!

Chicken finished

After the chicken was done (or nearly done), I placed it on the plate for a while to cook a little more, and covered it after a bit (to try to keep the outside rather crispy) to keep it warm.

(dark) browning the rice

Last was the Rice a Roni, added into some of the leftover chicken flavored oil. This time, I allowed the vermicelli and rice brown more than usual (to a dark brown, rather than light), before adding in the water and spices. After that, it was just waiting for the rice to finish.

Dinner! Only about 45 minutes cooking time!

When everything was done, it turned out pretty well. The chicken wasn’t quite as flavorful as I was expecting (perhaps I should have added some salt to it), but it was still tasty and a pretty pain-free way to have a roasted-like chicken!

We had a bit of group kitchen fun during Mary Beth’s last night – Chai Tea Frappes! Or at least our attempt (interpretation?) of one! Originally, the idea was to do a green tea frappe – though we ended up having chai tea – works just as well! While boiling a large part of water with the tea, we took to the ice.

Tea time

Of course the ice has to be crushed (since we were without blender – luckily, thanks to Mary Beth, we were with hammer). Wrapped in plastic baggies, ice crushing commenced. Not that the plastic bags actually contained the ice during the smashing, but that’s just a small detail!

Ice + Bag + Hammer = A night of fun

Ingredients

When the tea was sufficiently strong, we placed it in the freezer for faster chilling. When it was chilled, we added various amounts of tea, milk, ice, and vanilla ice cream. I think they turned out quite well! I really enjoyed the spices in the tea, and when mixed with the ice cream to give it sweetness and a little frothiness, it tasted almost like a Christmas drink! Or a chai frappe milkshake. Either way, it was a lot of fun and quite a memorable night!

A couple of weeks ago, we did a group dinner in the dorm to make a group pizza. Not too much to it, but it was a lot of fun. Nick, Ben, Mary Beth, and Cecilia had gotten various ingredients earlier. It started off with Ben and I kneading the pizza dough (which, being from Whole Foods seemed to be gluten and dairy free). There was a little improvisation – using a pasta sauce jar as a rolling pin, and aluminum foil for a baking sheet. After that, it was fairly simple – adding the marinara sauce, mozzarella cheese, and other toppings – spinach and tomatoes for the vegetarian pizza, and (huge) pepperoni and some veggies for the meat lovers pizza!

Pizza dough

Tomatoes

Pizza making

Huge pepperoni

After that, it was pizzas on the foil (in retrospect, we probably should have put some oil on the foil so it wouldn’t stick). It came out and it was pretty good! The outer crust was great, though the center was a little soggier – I suppose we could have had a hotter oven. But besides that, it was a great group meal!

Meat pizza

Veggie pizza

A little later, we added some naan bread pizzas to have some more to go around – they were great too!